Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

New work: The Italic I


"Vertigo looms, on the way to syncope. No longer the disordered vertigo of the first discomfort, not the ground falling away. It is a voluntary vertigo, radiating control". Catherine Clément, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture.

"A diagonal helps to temper the excessiveness of the One". Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman

The Italic I is a new body of work and ideas forming part of Tacturiency, my collaboration with Clare Thornton. Working in collaboration, Cocker + Thornton explore the different states of potential made possible through voluntarily surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. The studio is approached as a gymnasium, a training space for rehearsing, isolating and interrogating distinct moments or stages within falling. No longer considered an event to be avoided or protected against, falling is apprehended willfully and consciously as an exercise of both mind and body, tested out in physical and cognitive terms. By repeatedly staging a series of falls, Cocker + Thornton attempt to slow and extend the duration of falling in order to suspend and elaborate upon its discrete phases or scenes:


* Softening the Ground – setting up the conditions
* Preparing to Fall – warming and flexing
* Entering the Arc – trust, twist, torque
* A Commitment Made – working against impulse
* Letting Go – a liquid state
* Voluntary Vertigo – ilinx, inclination
* Becoming Diagonal – the italic i
* Touching Limits – tilt towards (the other)
* Ecstatic Impotency – the jouissance of impuissance
* Folding of Attention – heightened interiority
* Embodiment/Disembodiment – mind body partition
* Breathless – ventilating the idea
* Formless – horizontality
* Voluptuous Recovery – return, yet charged
* Recalibrate … Loop – desire to repeat

Through practice-based enquiry, Cocker + Thornton reflect on the capacity of voluntary falling for inoculating the body to the imagined threat of the fall and the experience of uncertainty and disorientation therein. Falling is instead considered as a kairotic site (of opportunity) for producing the vertiginous pleasure of unexpected forms of embodied knowledge and augmented subjectivity, activated in and through active inhabitation of the perceived passivity and impotency often associated with the fall.